Not many animals have teeth so
strong and sharp that they can cut through thick concrete and sheets of steel.
Rats constantly gnaw to stay alive. In-fact the word "Rat" literally
means "gnawing animal". Rats even have a kind of sonar - they use
the echoes created from grinding their teeth to enable them to choose the
clearest route. Their sense of balance is so highly evolved that they can
walk tightropes, scale a sheer brick wall, and land on their feet after
falling sixty feet from a building.
Rats are worriers like people, often biting
their nails, too, and they are instinctive planners or hoarders,
frequently collecting the same things human misers do, including money.
There is indeed at least one story of rats collecting live crabs for
food-biting off their legs and corralling them like cattle in their
burrows for a future food supply. At times, however, their voracious
appetites overwhelm their hoarding instincts. When Sheik Shakhbut, the
oil-rich former leader of Abu Dhabi, took an inventory of the immense
amounts of money he had hoarded in his chambers under the bed, stumped
inside his mattress, and stored in closets and boxes, he found that
rats had eaten over $2 million of it.